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Whether you’re looking to step up your spring training or revitalize a lagging New Year’s resolution, personal goal setting is incredibly beneficial. It can help bring new motivation and drive to your home workouts, similar to how a personal trainer adds an element of accountability that pushes your workouts/performance to a higher level. If you’re willing to put in a little time creating and defining your goals, you can bring this same level of energy to your treadmill, elliptical and recumbent bike workouts at home. The best goal-setting techniques will include both creative and concrete strategies that help you to visualize and believe in the end result, as well as to establish a path to lead you there.

Get Creative. While setting goals can be a bit scary, defining big-picture changes that you’d like to see brings meaning to your daily actions. Think big and think long term, coming up with a vision that will challenge you. Ask yourself where you want to be in five years. Do you have a healthy weight in mind? Perhaps you’ve become a regular runner and are playing in your local intramural athletics over the winter? Or maybe your driving vision has more to do with being around longer to enjoy a healthy life with your family. Whatever your vision, your goals will be more meaningful if you take the time to make them personal. Try stating your vision in the present tense, as though it’s already happened…such as, “at my annual physical, the doctor is congratulating me on my weight loss of 40 pounds,” and then working from that statement to develop your plan. The idea here is to create a vision that gives you focus and energy when sticking to your daily plan. Lululemon’s blog offers some great tools for goal setting, including a goal-setting worksheet that you can download here.

Make it Concrete: Once you’ve put your creativity into defining a personal, long-term goal, it’s time to get concrete about the shorter-term strategies you will use to reach that goal. Try breaking your long- term goal down to a shorter-term change, such as a weight loss of 10 pounds over the next three months. Then develop a plan for reaching that goal through your daily and weekly actions. This might include packing yourself a healthy lunch four days of your week, adding in additional workouts on your home exercise equipment and/or reducing empty calories such as sugar or alcohol. You can use the SMART acronym when defining your goal…making it Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-based. This will help you to prevent developing vague “goals,” such as “eat healthier,” without having a means of measuring your progress. Your job here is to come up with a plan for the frequency of your activities, a defined ending or check-in date and a little reality checking to make sure you won’t give up entirely the first time you skip a training session. For more help in creating a concrete, personal goal, check out this resource at Sparkpeople.

Keep Your Goal Alive: Once you’ve defined your goal and developed a plan for reaching it, find a way to bring reminders of your efforts into your daily life. You can enlist the help of others by bringing in friends, family or even an online community to increase your accountability and motivation. Schedule regular check-ins so that you have a way of measuring your progress. Also, create reminders in areas you’re likely to see them to help keep you on track. This might mean changing the wallpaper on your laptop to include motivating pictures and words, taping a goal race time to your treadmill to help you stick to your training schedule, putting a goal weight on the pantry door or just keeping a photo of your family where you can see it, if being healthy for them is your goal.

Weigh In: What goal-setting tricks and techniques keep you motivated to stick to your workouts at home?